Hello, James here! This coffee is the culmination of cupping, without exaggeration, over fifty different speciality microlots, hunting down something truly and undoubtedly spectacular. I'm going to write quite a lot about it below, but to put it simply, this is a coffee fermented with dehydrated peaches and wine yeast, and tastes, unsurprisingly, immensely peachy. It's incredible, with loads of sweetness, massive peach flavours, and a brilliant finish. This is really something special, and I know I speak for everyone here when I say we're so excited to share it with you all!

The farm 

This limited edition lot is grown by the ever-increasingly-famous Jairo Arcila of Armenia, Colombia, specifically Finca Santa Monica. The farm is at a relatively low altitude, 1450-1500m, with volcanic ash soil and relatively high temperatures and rainfall.

Jairo is famous for his experiments with coffee - just search for his name online and you'll see roastery after roastery boasting his crazy carbonic macerations, anaerobic naturals and brilliant fruit combinations. It's actually the same producer from which we purchased our White Wine Fermentation last year, and our Thermal Stroke this year, both of which were undoubtedly brilliant.

The process

Bear with me on this one. Jairo takes the cherries and puts them in GrainPro bags along with a hearty serving of wine yeast and, of course, dehydrated peaches. This glorious concoction then undergoes an anaerobic fermentation for 72 hours. After that, the cherries are placed with some peaches on raised beds to dry, just in case the coffee wasn't peachy enough already... Essentially, this makes it an anaerobic honey process, with added wine yeast and peaches. That was a pretty cool sentence to type out.

Jairo is right at the forefront of coffee experimentation - we actually tried several different versions of this process, with oranges for example, but there's something about the peaches that make this so brilliantly rounded and complex. Honestly, I can't oversell this, it's awesome.

The varietal

This lot is entirely Castillo - it's a very popular varietal in Colombia (not particularly surprising as it was created by the Federación Nacional de Cafeteros, of Colombia...) with great resistance to disease and impressive productivity.